Why BI professionals should pay attention to Social Media

At the end of the day every good marketer knows that BI drives CRM and great customer experiences. Companies/Brands who are charged w/ maintaining an accurate measure of the perceptions of their brand and customer experiences now have tools that provide real-time data. Social media is overflowing with expressive qualitative data that builds upon itself daily to show trends that are a) emerging, b) declining, c) established and d) fixed in time .

Until recently these brands had to rely on surveys, focus groups, and sales reports to get qualitative data. Now social media has made conversations quantifiable and this is changing CRM.

So who's doing it well?

• Zappos online shoe retailer chief social media marketer and tweeter is also the CEO
• Starbucks engages thousands of customers to generate new ideas
• Southwest Airlines uses social media (Facebook) to empower customers to manage theirt travel better.

So How can BI help?

Social Media Monitoring today is focused on the Quant side of things and this means tracking frequency, velocity and basic demographics. However, some new technologies like Techrigy SM2 are beginning to provide BI friendly insight into the qualitative side of social media using text analytics.

New tools like Techrigy SM2 allows BI Analysts to extract text data from large volumes of social media data quickly and inexpensively, The SM2 tool is built as a social media data warehouse and has the deepest data set available, monitoring almost every form of UGC and its corollary activity in 240 countries and 11 languages. SM2 will allow brands to “buy” as much or as little data as they like, without being locked in to a static set of monthly “keywords”.

When compared to traditional market research, the cost is similar but often lower and unlike questionnaires which are glorified "best guesses", text analytics is a very ordered and structured method for bridging the gap between qualitative and quantitative data of the same data set.

BI Analysts who want to empower CRM to meet the rising tide of customer expectations should demo the Techrigy Freemium tool today.

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